high political circles and consequently John Dillon, the Irish Party leader, was determined to discover and silence the culprit. It appears to have been Griffith.48 Meanwhile, the suppression of the Irish Financial Reform League, combined with the proposed Liberal Party budgets, led the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to argue that ‘the Chancellorship of the Exchequer has fallen into evil hands’.49 As some Irish bank directors were members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Oldham and Griffith’s idea of establishing a financial tribunal might have provoked a political response at this time if the will was present. However, the attention of the Irish Party, representing the majority of Irish politicians, was focused elsewhere.
In addition to its continued commitment to the Anglo-Irish security consensus of 1884–6, the Irish Party’s determination to boost its profile specifically among voters in Britain resurfaced at this time. This was attempted by the publication of a highly publicised biography of John Redmond (written by his own cousin and publicised by Childers) to celebrate the supposed arrival of the Irish Party leader as a central figure in British political life. This book did not question Redmond’s standing as the political representative of nationalist Ireland even though it quoted him proudly boasting that Irishmen could not survive economically for even a month if the country’s politicians did not rely entirely on Britain for direction.50 Combined with most Irish politicians’ reliance on the church, this trend was why Childers celebrated that ‘the strength and beauty’ of ‘the idea of home rule’, as well as ‘the vital energy on which its fruition depends’, was both ‘impossible to kill’ and would soon ‘place Mr. Redmond among the number of those who have saved the Empire from the consequences of its own errors’.51
Despite Griffith’s best efforts, the Sinn Féin People’s Bank had little more than a nominal existence as a cooperative bank. His concern with usury was in line with a broader trend within the Irish cooperative movement. This was the prevalence within rural Irish society of corrupt ‘gombeen men’ who acted as exploitative moneylenders; a trend made possible due to the comparative unwillingness of the Irish joint-stock banks to issue loans of Irish money to Irish people. As an ethical solution, Fr Finlay of UCD and Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society had invited some English agricultural bankers to set up their businesses in Ireland. In turn, these Englishmen won the support of the Congested Districts Board for their businesses. This resulted in the creation of a federation of agricultural credit societies in Ireland after 1900, but these had already begun to disintegrate by 1909.52 Griffith’s hope to apply the principle of cooperative banking to both a rural and urban community environment was connected to his idea of establishing a joint ‘agricultural and manufacturing union’ in Ireland;53 a goal which had been attempted, in vain, by republican Land Leaguers such as Thomas Brennan, Matthew Harris and Michael Davitt during the 1880s. This idea floundered once again after 1909 because William O’Brien’s Munster-centred attempt to prioritise the business interests of market towns was little more than an effort to heal a longstanding Tory–Irish Party divide in Cork city council that had developed during the mid-1880s and which had governed his actions, as well as that of his old Cork fenian friends, ever since that time.54
Along with his ongoing efforts to establish contacts with Irish businessmen living abroad,55 Griffith deemed the Sinn Féin Bank to be an initiative that was worth sustaining, no matter how disappointed he was at its results. Co-managed by Alderman Tom Kelly and his brother, the Sinn Féin Bank had a very small clientele that consisted almost exclusively of poor Dublin workers that were attempting to survive a contemporary housing crisis.56 With minimal capital it could not be a competitive threat to well-established financial institutions, let alone a proto-national bank, although the establishment of new financial bodies could serve to challenge existing business practices of older institutions. Reflecting this, late in 1910, Griffith would add to his proposed Sinn Féin programme the idea of ‘the foundation of a National Land Bank, subsidised to complete land purchase’ agreements. His idea here was to ensure that the British government would not have exclusive regulatory authority over this process and to encourage the Irish banks to look more sympathetically upon the demands of tenants for favourable terms.57
Griffith’s idea that the Irish county councils could promote the Sinn Féin Policy by threatening to transfer their accounts from the existing banks if the latter did not begin investing in Irish concerns did not win support from such quarters. The only cooperation with Sinn Féin (in the broadest possible sense) offered by the county councils related to the Gaelic League. This was the county councils’ decision to promote the idea of compulsory Irish for matriculation to the National University of Ireland (NUI) by subscribing funds to the NUI to persuade it to accept this principle. This decision was made in June 1910, to take effect three years hence, during the same week as Sinn Féin (inspired by Alderman Kelly’s opposition to the anti-Catholicism of the British coronation oath) worked to ensure Dublin city council would not pass a resolution expressing sympathy with the British Royal Family upon the death of King Edward VII.58
There was little or no appreciation for Sinn Féin within the NUI. Although Oldham, a distinguished graduate of TCD who was now at UCD, had been bold enough to express Sinn Féin-like dissatisfaction with Irish economic circumstances, Griffith was very disappointed by the general lack of initiative of NUI staff in such matters:
When the National University was founded we hoped for something from that institution. It has a professor of political economy and a professor of national economics and a number of lesser instructors of the popular mind. Is it premature to ask when these gentlemen will begin to realise that there is a relation between economics in a university and the people outside?59
Griffith believed that the root of this lack of initiative was that the NUI’s staff, reflecting Archbishop Walsh’s chancellorship, were too concerned with trying to assume a personal social status to rival that of the employees of the historically more prestigious (and Church of Ireland owned) Trinity College. This was leading to appointments being chosen more on the basis of personal friendships, clericalism and party political influence rather than actual academic vision or merit. Although Griffith fully agreed that the NUI needed to aim to become ‘a popular university’, he deemed its manner of attempting to achieve this goal as fundamentally mistaken.60 In turn, he judged that the mental outlook of the university and its staff was far too inward looking and self-congratulatory to be truly benefiting Irish society; hence, most of its graduates were still choosing to emigrate.61 The NUI was only a nominally non-denominational university. The Catholic hierarchy, reflecting Archbishop Walsh’s chancellorship, were generally allowed to act as significant political players behind the scenes, while both Trinity College Dublin (which remained in Church of Ireland hands) and Queen’s University Belfast (which was governed largely by Presbyterians) remained separate institutions, thereby helping to cement north–south and religious political divisions on the island with the full support of Ireland’s political and religious representatives and, of course, the British government, which funded the universities.62 This was why the British government’s decision, acting on the advice of Edward Carson, to treat the Irish question after 1911 purely in terms of religious demographics was a tactic that it could assume to have had an inherent Irish approval.
If Griffith’s ideas were often interesting, they still disqualified him from being accepted by Ireland’s professional classes. Gaelic League stalwarts Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde not only considered Sinn Féin to be a complete non-player but had also acquired NUI professorships by playing ball politically through maintaining a working political relationship with both the Irish Party and the Catholic hierarchy. By contrast, Griffith, rather like Patrick Pearse of An Claidheamh Solus, had been left in a very precarious position, both financially and in terms of his career prospects. Reflecting this, John Sweetman decided to resign as president of Sinn Féin early in 1911 because Griffith had intimated his intention to do the unmentionable; namely, to begin criticising the religious communities in Ireland for ignoring the economic consequences of their purely selfish actions.63 The withdrawal of Sweetman’s support increased Griffith’s financial difficulties in sustaining Sinn Féin. Griffith appealed in vain to Sweetman to reconsider his decision to resign,64 while by the summer of 1912 it would become necessary for Griffith to consider mortgaging
